“The precipitancy of my demands upon your gate and your hospitality must have something of an air of impertinence,” said Count Victor briskly, unbuckling his sword and laying it before him on the table; “but the cause of it lay with several zealous gentlemen, who were apparently not affected by any law against tartan, for tartan they wore, and sans culottes too, though the dirt of them made it difficult to be certain of either fact. In the East it is customary, I believe, for the infidel to take off his boots when he intrudes on sacred ground; nothing is said about stockings, but I had to divest myself of both boots and stockings. I waded into Doom a few minutes ago, for all the world like an oyster-man with my bag on my back.”
“Good God!” cried the Baron. “I forgot the tide. Could you not have whistled?”
“Whole operas, my dear M. le Baron, but the audience behind me would have made the performance so necessarily allegretto as to be ineffective. It was wade at once or pipe and perish. Mon Dieu! but I believe you are right; as an honest man I cannot approve of my first introduction to your tartan among its own mountains.”
“It must have been one of the corps of watches; it must have been some of the king's soldiers,” suggested the Baron.
Count Victor shrugged his shoulders. “I think I know a red-coat when I see one,” said he. “These were quite unlicensed hawks, with the hawk's call for signal too.”
“Are you sure?” cried the Baron, standing up, and still with an unbelieving tone.
“My dear M. le Baron, I killed one of the birds to look at the feathers. That is the confounded thing too! So unceremonious a manner of introducing myself to a country where I desire me above all to be circumspect; is it not so?”
As he spoke he revealed the agitation that his flippant words had tried to cloak—by a scarcely perceptible tremour of the hand that drummed the table, a harder note in his voice, and the biting of his moustache. He saw that Doom guessed his perturbation, and he compelled himself to a careless laugh, got lazily to his feet, twisted his moustache points, drew forth his rapier with a flourish, and somewhat theatrically saluted and lunged in space as if the action gave his tension ease.
The Baron for a moment forgot the importance of what he had been told as he watched the graceful beauty of the movement that revealed not only some eccentricity but personal vanity of a harmless kind and wholesome tastes and talents.
“Still I'm a little in the dark,” he said when the point dropped and Count Victor recovered.